


The Curious Ways of Bertie Wells

by clickingkeyboards



Category: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Character Study, Developing Relationship, Drinking, I was wondering what a realistic version of Bertie’s life at Cambridge would look like, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Smoking, Thus the existence of this fic, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 01:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 4,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25905340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clickingkeyboards/pseuds/clickingkeyboards
Summary: A study by Harold Mukherjee
Relationships: Harold Mukherjee/Bertie Wells
Comments: 1
Kudos: 20





	1. his drinking habits

The air is thick and warm with ideas that will be forgotten when the shot that sparked it is chased, burning bronzed and bright. Pictures and plaques, the emblem of fading class, dance in swimming lines on the wall, but the brightest light sits at the bar.

“What brings you to sitting alone in a pub at two in the morning?” The question burns like the last shot that was taken hours ago. When his fingertips went blurry and he stumbled against the wall at what could have been seven or ten, he handed his wallet to somebody he can hardly remember the name of because they’re all unfailingly English. Sobering up seemed like a capital idea when he realised that nobody else was in the right state of mind to consider escorting everybody else to their beds, but he suddenly feels drunk all over again as he takes a seat beside a shock of blond hair with clawed hands shaking as they grip what would have been one drink too many four hours ago.

“Best friend murdered someone. You?”

He would spit but there is no drink in his hand to comfort him. “You’ve had one too many.” The words dive into the air between them and fall onto tarnished shoes, and it’s all he can do to watch shaking hands tip back the rest of a drink and ask for another. And another. And another.

“I’m taking him back,” he asserts, prying a glass from shaking hands and putting an unsure arm over his shoulders, and walking a stumbling waltz from the bar and into the cool night air.

Words fall out and form the sentence, “You’re making no sense,” as mumbles that could jail someone are carefully ignored.

The sounds of the bar fall further and further behind, laughter and singing crushed beneath the soles of shoes that could once be called smart, and he envisions a different version of that night.

As he presses a business card into shaking, alcohol-scented fingers, he imagines a night spent across the table from an attractive blue-eyed stranger with a face made for newspaper columns, taking burning shots and making the bad choices that come to men like him after two hands meet over the same prize. The night he pictures is one where the ensuing fight is not of fists meeting cheeks and lips split, and blazers torn off in furious haste, but of hands entangled in hair and fingers reaching for hips, lips bruised and swollen and blazers hastily forgotten in dark alleyways for a very different reason.


	2. his penchant for expensive cigars

“You smoke?”

“You don’t?”

Wells is the picture of a scholar, drooping emerald neckties and dripping vines twining together as he drapes himself back against warm stone. Slender and pale fingers card through slouching golden curls, tumbling and carefree to follow the lines of his relaxed posture and pointed, sharp shape. A lithe smile decorates his face as he flourishes a match between delicate fingers, tumbling the flame over and over before raising it to his mouth to light a cigar. The way he glows is galactic, and the cigar burns sharp and bright. 

“Why poison yourself?”

Smoke tumbles from his mouth and up against the brickwork, bruising the building. “For the fun of it,” Wells breathes out with the ash.

Stepping forward and holding out a hand, he asks what the appeal is. Instead of pressing a cigar into his hand, Wells takes one from the gilded box in his pocket and in a flourish of agile fingers and a flurry of smoke, places it between his lips himself. Fingers brush foreign lips and smoke falls into chests and, inside a Cambridge bluster of tobacco smoke and the pads of soft fingers, breathing feels like falling.

“Want a light?”

The appeal of cigars is not supposed to be the spark in the contact of alcohol-saturated scholars raising a match and brushing your cheek as they offer a light. A dim thought is nothing in a haze of smoke in which he is blinded by Wells, the sheer light he gives off and the heat of his hands, and the way golden curls capture the bitterly cold sunshine.

The match is thrown to the ground and extinguished by the crush of the heel of a previously smart shoe.

“This will kill you.” Delicate fingers pressed into his arm are hardly there at all, but they guide him back against the wall and they breathe together, scholars enveloped by smoke. 

Wells takes a drag. “All part of the plan.”

He breathes in, wants to choke, gasps the feeling out again. “Slowly.”

“Painfully.” It’s a challenge, wrapped around a confident and measured breath that draws in smoke.

Taking a drag, he says, “Dragged out beyond measure.”

“Tell me how it would feel.”

It’s bait and he knows it. Being lured in by Wells entices like the pull of smoke. “Like drowning. Like dying. As if smoke itself has seized your heart and you can hardly breathe without thinking of it. You live and breathe in it and then you drown in it.”

In a rush of breath, they exhale in tandem and the air is filled with plumes of smoke. All they can see is each other.

Suddenly, they aren’t talking about smoking anymore.

“Sounds like the perfect way to go.”


	3. how he drinks cheap wine

In a haze of laughing students forgetting their hours of training on how to conduct themselves at parties, he only has eyes for a scholar in a billowing white shirt and bottle green trousers, curled up in a window seat and drinking straight from the bottle.

“What warrants drinking from the bottle, Wells?”

“Drink with me, Mukherjee.”

He tries, in vain, to press himself up against cool paint because a blue gaze is enticing and pulls him into conversations that rush down dreadfully improper side streets. Wells merely stretches out his long legs over his lap and offers out the bottle.

The smell of cigar smoke rolls richly from his blazer, mixed with cologne and turning into an oddly sweet and suffocating scent. “Cheap wine.”

“When you’re drinking to forget somebody, they aren’t worth more than the cheapest wine that money can buy.” 

He holds out a hand to Wells, asking for the bottle. Instead of pressing it into cool, nervous hands, he leans forward and presses the mouth of the bottle to his lips, tipping wine into his mouth. Astringent wine has a parching burn to it, but he swallows and Wells smiles.

“Favourite wine?” Wells asks, and his voice is rough and low, rumbling and rolling. He can feel it more than he hears it. 

Taking the bottle and drinking deeply, he says, “Riesling. You?”

“Ruché. It’s a red.”

Two scholars curl up on a window seat, sharing a bottle of wine and locking eyes as they swallow, drinking from the same mouth until the rooms empty out.

Heavy words break up light footfalls that have been running rings in their imaginations. “I’m sorry.”

“As sorry as every judge I’ve ever met in my life.”

Wells fields a barrage of hopeless apologies, and stops when he says, “What can I say, then?”

“Something that means something,” he replies in tones more cordial than he feels, unlatching the window. The night curls over them but does nothing to dissipate the tension that sticks on them like smoke sticks to blazers and neckerchiefs and favoured silk shirts. “Not empty words.”

“I’ll drink with you for as long as you like.”

Raising the almost empty bottle, Wells invites him to drown in blue eyes, and he jumps without pausing for breath. “So drink with me.”

A glance is dealt to the gramophone. The cards are on the table. “So  _ dance _ with me.”

“So have your way with me.” Slender fingers touch his thigh. 

Caressing a cheek, dark fingers sharp against flushed skin. “So kiss me.”

Although nobody moves, the air is thick with promise as they finish the bottle, both holding onto the neck with uncertain fingers that brush each other, and do not flinch away. 


	4. his love of climbing

“You could thread the stars if you tried.”

Cresting the carved edge of the roof, he says, “That sounds like a death sentence to me, Mukherjee.”

The stars dance a waltz as he spins in a circle atop Mauldin, constellations whirling into words and spelling out a thousand confessions in sentences he will never pause to read.

“We are so very small.” Whispers seem to carry over the city, but fall to the ground halfway to Wells.

“That can’t be true. Not when you are the only thing I can see.”

Without turning, he feels the warmth of a blue gaze wrapping around him, over his shoulders and down to his fingertips. “All of Cambridge is spread out in front of you.”

“And I’m choosing to focus on you.”

“What does that say about your disposition, Wells?” he says in a murmur that is hardly even a noise. Teasing him feels like leaping off a cliff.

“I’m trying not to think about it.”

The world at his fingertips is no longer interesting. “Is there anything interesting to get up to, or shall we climb back down?”

“I imagine that climbers have got up to all manner of deviancy in all sorts of curious places.”

Laughter is not dangerous anymore. Instead, it’s warm. It fills him up and falls from his fingertips and flies into the air, and falls back down when he notices blue eyes on him. “Is that an invitation?”

“It is whatever you want it to be.”

“What if I want direct instructions?”

He produces two cigars and lights one. As he watches, Wells steps forward, raises his hand, and places it between his lips with a fleeting touch to his cheek. It feels like fire. “Then you’ll be waiting a while.”

“I believe that the end result is worth the world and more.”

Scholars stand abreast atop a college watching the world turn, feeling smoke brush past their fingertips and knowing that their jackets and neckerchiefs will be full of the smell of smoke and the memory of that night for weeks to come. Without saying what they want to, they say it all and so much more. One quotes _The Iliad_ , and the other recites a romantic monologue. When Wells makes a poor joke about King James V, he responds with a paragraph from _The Picture of Dorian Gray_. Oscar Wilde poems are deflected by Michelangelo references that are glossed over and explained and laughed at until neither can recall where the conversation began.

When he catches his breath, still smiling a smile that feels more dangerous than the fact that they are a mere step from a drop to certain death, he says, “You are a regular marvel, Bertie Wells.”


	5. the way he approaches studying

“Are you paying attention?”

It’s clear that Wells isn’t. Why should he be? Words about historical trials and tribulations have never sounded less interesting, especially when the young scholar saying them is trying to join up constellations in the pockmarked table surface and ignore the brandy-flushed but beautiful features across the table threatening to pull him into distraction.

“I’m certainly studying,” Wells replies, and he sounds like danger. He looks up to blue eyes; they’re lit up amber in the low library light. Down again to long, slender fingers curling over the pages of a textbook. “It’s just a matter of whether or not I’m studying  _ history _ .”

A polished patent leather shoe traces up his leg beneath the table, pushing up his trousers and stopping his scolding before it passes his lips. “Which one is more interesting, do you think?”

Kaleidoscope images of drinking deeply across the table from a fierce blue-eyed stranger have started to drown in bottles of brandy pressed between pale hands, burning shots sliding with a hot ache replaced by the fiery feeling that is stuck, pressed between his ribs, as he watches Wells take a deep drink.

Admonishments that he is too drunk to study die in his throat.

“Give me a drink.”

“Demanding.”

His hand stays extended, and Wells reaches out to teasingly trace slender fingers across the lines in his palm. Vague memories of someone calling them ‘story lines’ crawl to the surface. He cannot breathe.

Dark fingers reach, eyes pull, lips draw to a close. He presses his lips to the back of a pale hand, forcing himself to fall deep into blue eyes and not drown; to live to enjoy how the water reacts.

Breath hitches and muscles tense, and the unbearable heat between them aches.

“Get drunk with me, Mukherjee,” he mumbles. He looks hungry.

“Every right answer, I’ll take a drink.”

Wells suddenly knows the answers, says them with an impish grin, and he suspects that the bastard knew them all along. He fulfils his promise, drinking deeply until his throat burns and his lungs scream for air, and his breath is brandy and pink lips wet with alcohol are suddenly not a world away. It is merely a matter of distance.

He braces a hand on the edge of the table, and the air sticks underneath his fingertips. “May I?” he breathes.

Wells looks desperate. “Please.”

He pries away tense fingers wrapped around the neck of a bottle, raises his hand to his mouth, and kisses the palm. “Let go of the bottle for one night, Bertie.”

“What do I do, if not that?”

His hand finds its way to the back of his neck, settles there against skin on fire, setting his body alight. “Try getting drunk on this, dear.”

It tastes of brandy and smoke, and the risk of being alive. They steal kiss after kiss between drinks of brandy, feeling skin under the pads of their fingers and gasping out flirtatious sentences until the drink turns their fingertips fuzzy and their kisses clumsy. Hand in hand, fumbling with heavy fingers, they stumble with loosened ties and undone top buttons, distressed hair and creased collars. 

This was never about studying.


	6. his attitude towards dark humour

There is no word for it yet. Acquaintances have tried, deep in bottles of wine and jokes about homosexuality, unaware that it’s quite the truth. That word sits heavy on his shoulders, clinically sour to the taste when he says it. Romantic is not the word for it, despite the records and the roses. Kisses and conversations sit separately, carefully across the room and separated by a whirlwind of late-night trysts spinning across the carpet. Neither wants to have the conversation.

He remembers a late-night declaration from Wells that felt too intimate for a bed. “Conversations break people open. Intimacy should be kept closed.”

Silence is what keeps their connection tied together, a constellation of kisses behind the lecture hall and over the pages of textbooks, fumbling hands interrupted by curses and bottles pressed between thumb and forefinger. Neither asks what word they are using.

To be known as nothing is quite alright.

“Are we going to talk about it?”

He breathes out a tumble of smoke. “Words don’t matter.”

“I think they do,” he replies softly. Wells passes the cigar to his left and he takes it.

“It means nothing.  _ This  _ means nothing.” He gestures between them, disturbing the smoke blown from his mouth as the statement pulls it open. 

He thinks that his heart flies into his throat, breathing and beating inside his head and filling his ears with the rush of blood. This  _ has  _ to mean something, because he has given it everything he has. There is nothing more in his heart or his head, or any more breath in his lungs, to convince Bertie that they matter. What he has given is not enough.

Apart from saying  _ I love you _ .

“How can you say that?” he manages to choke out around a spat mouthful of smoke. “I’ve given you all I  _ have _ .”

Wells stares forward, shining eyes focused on the clock, allowing them second after second to exist. “I can’t afford to give you all  _ I _ have. I’m sorry.”

He swallows hard and tries not to feel like he’s about to die. In a burst of tears, he fails. The world falls apart in fits and starts of dripping paint and darts flying through the air, shots sliding down throats and papers flying into the air on the worm. “I’ve clearly misunderstood what this is.”

“ _ This  _ doesn’t have any words attached to it,” he spits in response and it’s a lie. Lies sound bitter and they’re spoken with fierceness that disguises nonexistent honesty. He has shared a bed with Wells for long enough to know when he isn’t telling the truth. Knowing that doesn’t seem to matter anymore: Wells knows that he’s lying, does it knowing that  _ he _ knows, and does not care.

“I’d die without you.”

Wrapped in a scowl, he says, “You were alive before we fell into bed together.”

The words explode from his chest as if he was winded by the brutal honesty, and he shouts, “I’d kill for you.”

A spell is broken, everything shatters at once. The slow pieces falling from a tower are nothing to the cataclysmic admission that brings the truth tumbling down onto tarnished shoes.

“That,” Wells hisses, and the words set off a twisted thunderstorm, “is not a compliment.” Lightning strikes from his mouth and the thunder rolls inside his head, and the rain pours. It pours and pours until they drown, and their tangled tryst of unspoken promises on top of Maudlin is relived quite back to front as Wells throws himself out of the window and begin the climb the drainpipe.

He drops the cigar on his desk in his haste to run to the window. A letter covered in Bertie’s scrawling hand is caught in the blaze, and he can’t find it in himself to care.


	7. his peculiar taste in tea

Other students have been giving him peculiar looks all week and Bertie hasn’t been at their lectures. Professors question his lack of participation. He thinks of the letter he has been drafting and redrafting until he hands bleed and doesn’t look them in the eye.

When he pushes open the window to a room in Staircase Nine, he notes the still-smoking cigar discarded on the sill. Ash is splattered against the window in sputters. Stretched out on the sofa, looking rather like a painting of a forgotten Greek tragedy, is Wells. Eyes closed. Head thrown back. Without a care in the world.

An instrument is cradled in his hands. The same several chords ring across the room, over and over.

“Bertie.”

“Go away.”

His eyes blaze blue.

“Can’t I talk to you?”

“I told you that we’re done.” Wells gets to his feet. Leers over him. It is either a dare or bait. Either option is attractive. 

His voice comes out soft, pliant. “You look like a man in mourning.”

“I need you to leave.”

“One last dance?”

“Lovers dance. And I am  _ not your lover _ !” Wells roars the last words, and there are tears on his face.

“What would you call us, if not lovers?” he asks, bolder than he has ever been in the face of his feelings. “You have had me in ways nobody else ever would. Said things to me that nobody else ever has. Promised me things only you would be able to give. What are we, if not lovers? Partners? Significant others?  _ Boyfriends _ ?”

“I’m bloody poison!” Wells spits. “I’m a poisonous lover!”

“Then kill me.”

The silence does not swell, rise up between them. Instead, it shrinks, pulls gasps from their throats, pulls their air in their lungs closer and ties their heartstrings together. Like a discarded letter, it crumples between them, pulls them together like words on the opposite ends of a page thrown together by the twist of a fist.

Wells is hoarse when he says, “I should step away.” 

“You won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“You’re in love with me.” The certainty of his statement is like a blow. Still, he forges onwards. “Why else would you let somebody know your drinking habits…” He rests a hand up Wells’ sleeve. “...your penchant for expensive cigars…” He brushes some cigar ashes off Wells’ waistcoat. “...how you grieve for a friendship while drinking cheap wine…” He traces his fingers up his throat, and Wells moves his head, lets him do it. “...how you adore climbing more than you rely on drink…” His hand comes to rest on Wells’ jaw, and he doesn’t pull away. “...the way you approach studying, and drunken seduction…” His other hand comes to rest over his heart, toys with his vibrant neckerchief. “...and how you respond when idiots say that they would kill for you.”

He can feel a heartbeat under his hand.

“If this meant nothing, I wouldn’t know the strangest domestic things about you.” They are almost breathing in each other’s mouths now. “How you tie your laces. The way you slide a record from its case. Your peculiar taste in tea. I know exactly how this kiss is going to taste.”

“Go on.” Breathlessness catches in the air and he knows that he has won.

“Cigars. Chocolates. Your peculiar chilli and lime green tea.”

Wells smiles. “You’re terrible for me.”

“I disagree.”

When Bertie kisses him, he feels as if all of the emotions he has poured into letters have risen to meet his lips. The kiss tastes of cigars, chocolate, and imported tea, and so does the next.

And the next.

And the next.

And the next.


	8. how he looks in dark libraries

“I thought you were supposed to be tutoring me.”

He shakes himself back to reality. The blue eyes that he had been wrapped up in are teasing, and books have never been less interesting. Despite forcing his eyes back to the textbooks scattered across the table, his attention floats somewhere high above him. Locked on blond hair and trapped in blue eyes, and utterly unable to focus on cramped words on a cramped desk in a cramped library. 

“You’re supposed to pay your tutors,” he says, feeling as if he is speaking through all of the other words he wants to say. 

“I can pay you in another way, sweetheart.”

Teasing is tempting but he refuses to give in. Too many study sessions, he thinks dimly, have been thrown away in his fall for flirtatious glances and suggestive comments. “ _ Don’t _ . We’re supposed to be studying.”

“You got distracted, darling, don’t blame me.” Bertie lounges back in his chair, purposefully dragging his eyes up and down his frame.

“I  _ can _ blame you.” It comes out as a hiss.

“Are you really so furious with me?”

Embarrassment snakes up his neck in a blush. “Shut  _ up _ . Not everything has to be… well, like  _ that _ .”

“But most things could be.”

“You are infuriating, are you aware of that?” The insult feels like clawing back control, but Bertie is unphased. 

“Proudly.”

He wants to scowl but it comes out as an expression open and pleased.

“I’m wearing you down, aren’t I?”

“Not at all.”

Bertie gives him a look of enormous eyes, pleading. He squares his shoulders and sets his jaw and turns Bertie back to his work. 

As Bertie turns down to his essay, passing flirtatious comments here and there in hopes to convince him to let up on making him revise, he pulls out some notepaper and puts a new cartridge in his fountain pen.

A love letter takes shape under his pen. Words pour out as if right from the chambers in his heart, and he writes for so long that he forgets where he is. Bertie finishes his essay, takes a deep drink, falls asleep over his books. It’s a twisted version of the letter that he never used, begging Bertie for his heart back. Instead, he cries out for years more of their drunken fumbles, asks for his companionship for the rest of their lives, calls back to meaningful glances and whispers between sheets. He delivers promises of kisses under stars and fanciful dares, a hundred more love letters and promises that he will never say something as idiotic as he did before ever again in their lives. Soaring descriptions talk of a dance on the roof of Maudlin, the way that the stars would whisper as they do. Flourishes of ink makes descriptions of fantasies far bolder than he could ever manage aloud, but he has always been braver on paper. 

It is not a letter begging for something he already has, but rather he is desperate for what he already has to stay.

When the letter draws to a close, he folds it. Caps his pen. Waits for the ink to dry. He slips it between the pages of a textbook and closes it, tucks it into Bertie’s bag. An incentive to study, he finds himself thinking. 

He wakes Bertie, who comes to in a start of mumbles and requests for a kiss. He delivers eagerly, despite the danger surrounding them, what would happen if they were discovered.

Bertie Wells makes him want to break rules, and how irriestable he looks in the light of dark libraries has something to do with how enticing the idea of being daring is. He, for the first time in his life, wants to be reckless with his love. 


	9. how easy he is to convince

“Why won’t you come climbing?”

Bertie is sitting at his desk by the window, glaring at the young man slouched on the sill and smoking a cigar. “I’m studying.”

“But I’m so much more  _ interesting  _ than your work, aren’t I?”

Ducking his head, he shifts away, knotting stressed fingers into drooping blond curls. “Aren’t I supposed to be the bad influence?”

“Let me have my turn, my love.”

He makes a noise akin to a hiss and turns back to his textbook, but he finds the words much less interesting than they were before.

Watching as Bertie’s eyes unfocus, catching the glances he casts towards the figure in the window, he persists. He knows, sure as anything, that he’s getting somewhere. “You don’t need to study, not when you oughtn't bother with your exams at all. For men like you… why, you’re just killing time until you become a Lord! You get hundreds of pounds for the job and you can spend the rest of your life doing whatever you please.”

“That’s not quite how it works.”

“Only because you upper-classes love to over-complicate the simplest of things.” He reaches over and catches Bertie’s left hand, which he’s using to wave him away. “Can’t it be simple? You’ll never have to worry about exams in your life, not when you’re destined to become a lord.”

Bertie rolls his eyes, flicks ink from his fountain pen. It splatters quite artistically across his white shirt, and he raises his eyebrows. “You’re only making me look more scholarly.”

“For goodness sake, shut  _ up _ .” His scowl is forced and his mouth breaks into a smile that he hides behind his hand. 

“And, if you’re serious… remember when you said that we’re forever?”

It was a useless question about an unforgettable conversation. Two weeks before, after heated kisses and tearful confessions, two scholars had stood together on the roof of Maudlin, sharing a cigar. “Romances like this… they either fall apart altogether, or fall together and never break apart,” Bertie had said, catching his hand and holding it fast.

Lovers hold hands, but he didn’t mind. They are lovers, after all.

“I’ve never given anything as much of my heart as I’ve given this,” he replied.

“Then… if I want this to be forever, would you be alright with that?”

He had leant over, rested his head on Bertie’s shoulder, trying not to show his smile. “Perfectly.”

“How could I forget that?”

“Well… then I have no reason to bother about exams either.” The statement feels like the catch of the coldest gust of wind that passes over the top of the tallest climbing haunts in Cambridge. 

Back in a warm Cambridge dorm, Bertie runs a hand through golden hair and says, “What do you mean?”

He can tell that Bertie knows what he means, but wants him to say it aloud. He rises to the challenge. “The salary of a lord can support two scholars, you know.”

“Are you trying to… flirt me out of my work?”

“Like you haven’t been doing the same since we met!” he laughs, and there is a twinkle in his voice.

Bertie, at last, breaks. “You can tell me about… about our future later. Let me get my climbing shoes.”

“ _ Finally _ .”

The ensuing heated kiss combined with his shoulders shaking with mirth almost knocks him off the sill. “Which climb shall we do?”

He feels daring. So many climbs have never been attempted by their generation of climbers, or tried for a price of broken legs, bloody noses, and being sent down in disgrace. “Do you want to try and climb the Chapel tonight?”

“Have I made you daring?”

Rolling his eyes, he replies, “Not everything is because of you.”

He means  _ yes _ .


End file.
